tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018371774869383950.post209004364650634049..comments2023-09-20T16:55:09.433+01:00Comments on A Shiny World: 140 characters or lesslouloukhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11562093751876067547noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018371774869383950.post-7933332575647827382010-03-17T21:17:28.881+00:002010-03-17T21:17:28.881+00:00I don't feel Twitter connects me at a fundamen...I don't feel Twitter connects me at a fundamental level at all. Twitter is just a transport medium.<br /><br />I don't necessarily feel more connected to people because of Twitter. If I wasn't connecting to people via it, I'd be connecting via Facebook, or via Mono, or via SMS. Whatever was most useful, in fact.<br /><br /><br />Twitter's main advantage - and the reason I use it more often - is indeed its message character limit. But it's a more basic limitation that really makes it useful - it's just short text messages.<br /><br />Facebook, on first glance, should be more useful. Photo galleries, apps, walls, groups, it has it all.<br /><br />Which is why when I do log in to Facebook at the end of the day (an increasingly rare thing, btw), I'm bombarded by a new set of crappy applications, group memberships I couldn't care about, and so forth. All of which I have to then hide (if possible) or filter out manually as I read it. It's crap. And it's made crap by being all things to all people. It's the 80/20 rule of usage, writ large into communications software.<br /><br />Whereas Twitter just sends messages. Like a huge public broadcast SMS infrastructure. And that's what makes it useful - that and the fact that it preserves the messages (unlike SMS), allows them to be searched, and allows you to alert specific people via a simple mechanism.<br /><br />And then the killer fact is that an API allows this to happen with a huge multitude of clients, on different devices, easily.<br /><br />But it's still just a utility. In the same sense that my phone service is a utility. It doesn't make connections for me.<br /><br />I'll talk to just about anyone. I think that's probably fairly well known by my friends.<br /><br />I make connections with people. I make them through different mediums, but changing the technology doesn't change the fact that when I make a connection with someone else, it's made by the people involved, not the medium. The medium could be Mono, the bar at the SMWS, or a delayed train.<br />(Yes, I've connected with people because of delayed trains.)<br /><br />Twitter may make it a tad easier to find people because of hashtags. But I'm not the kind of person that would check his phone when instead I could strike up conversation. Especially when it's obvious we're all there for the same sorts of reasons...<br /><br />That doesn't mean that your experience is in some way invalid. Or that you were doing anything wrong. Just that we're using technology in very different ways, because we're very different people.<br /><br />Different enough that you're using the word "fundamental" when it wouldn't even occur to me to do so. "Handy", yes. "Essential", well, not yet - but ask me in two years.<br /><br /><br />When we can get the protocol to federate across multiple providers, it'll be a candidate for a true utility. Then it may be fundamental. But until then, it's just a useful tool for me.Philip Storryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09627008430772981785noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018371774869383950.post-12431124345574203822010-03-17T16:18:30.094+00:002010-03-17T16:18:30.094+00:00When we look at the communication successes of the...When we look at the communication successes of the past, we often find that ideas expand when space is actually limited. The 160 character limit of an SMS message has not stopped over 9billion texts being sent per month (source: http://www.text.it/mediacentre/sms_figures.cfm), and the graffiti "artists" that decorate the spaces alongside the railways certainly look for for creative ways to use restricted space. Indeed, effective advertising is often about making the biggest impact for the smallest space, as space is usually associated with cost. <br /><br />Increasingly, we are seeing a permanent connection to the online world, and it's no longer the one way feed of information from corporate to the consumer. Even your satnav can share routes and traffic information between units, building a sense of community amongst "end users" (for major leaps in this area, take a look at Nokia's "terminal mode" project - http://tinyurl.com/ycop84p ).<br /><br />Twitter has a 140 character limit, but history has shown us that such limits have ironically promoted communication. People have to be creative to make the best use of 140 characters, but thankfully, thinking creative is exactly what we want them to do.Ian Cookenoreply@blogger.com